Side effects predict breast cancer treatment’s success

London, October 31: Though otherwise uncomfortable, symptoms like hot flushes, night sweats and painful joints may be a good sign for women taking the breast cancerdefine therapy – they help predict the success of the cancer therapy, a new study suggests.

Women who experience the menopause-like symptoms upon taking hormone-based drugs for breast cancerdefine are 10 percent less likely to have a recurrence of the disease, researchers touted.

Tamoxifendefine and anastrozole, two commonly used hormone-based breast cancer drugs are often prescribed to breast cancer patients upon successful completion of conventional therapies like radiationdefine and chemotherapy to help prevent the recurrence of disease.

"The treatment is designed to starve potential cancers of estrogen and these symptoms mean that there are lower levels of estrogen in the body," study’s lead author, Jack Cuzick, an epidemiologist at Cancer Research UK, explained.

For the study, 4,000 women with early-stage breast cancer were recruited. All post-menopausal, the patients were treated with either an older cancer drug tamoxifen or a newer version Arimidex, generically known as anastrozole.

While 37.5 percent women reportedly experienced hot flushes and night sweats within three months of treatment, they subsequently stood a lower tumor recurrence risk than women without the symptoms.

Following a nine-year recurrence rate, 18 percent of the women experiencing side-effects reported tumor recurrence as compared to 23 percent who did not experience side effects.

Moreover, the recurrence risk plunged further if the women developed painful joint symptoms too. Breast cancer tumors returned in 14 percent of women who developed painful joints compared to 23 percent who did not experience such side-effect.

More research is needed to understand whether having these symptoms is essential for the treatment to be effective, however as of now, researchers urge patients to stick to their hormone-based treatment, despite uncomfortable symptoms.

Though the second most common type of cancer, after lung cancer, breast cancer accounts for the highest death toll among women worldwide. Of the 1.3 million new cases of breast cancer diagnosed globally in 2007, an estimated 465,000 women died.